Silent Night

 

There are over two hundred Christmas films listed on movie databases and generally they tend to be light-hearted, happy, humorous, sentimental and uplifting. Silent Night (Camille Griffin 2021) is a massive exception to that rule. It is definitely seasonal in theme, but it is an extremely dark and grim production. It is supposed to be a black comedy; but, although it has a few droll moments, I didn't find it all that funny. It is actually very tragic. It seems to me to be loosely based on the book On the Beach by Nevil Shute, a novel written in the 1950's and inspired by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests which poisoned the local area with radioactive fallout. The story is about a group of old friends meeting up to spend Christmas together in the country house of one of them, Nell, where she lives with her husband and three sons. At first everything seems normal, but then slowly a sinister anomaly emerges. For instance, one of the characters has a black eye and they talk about having to fight and steal Christmas presents. The Queen's speech took place in a bunker surrounded by canned food. The characters are trying to act cheerfully, but they do so in a very forced and bittersweet way. Something is obviously very wrong. Many thanks to my YouTube friend"Jamnoise72" for letting me know about this film on a recent livestream, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/12/germany-livestream.html. (Warning- spoilers below!) It turns out that the earth has been struck down by a catastrophic global environmental disaster in which a cloud of toxic gas is filling the atmosphere causing most or all of life on earth to die. "Greta warned us!" shouts Art, one of the boys. As it happens there is no complete explanation of what this gas cloud is and certainly no explicit link to climate change. It is however implied that this is definitely a disaster caused by human abuse of the earth's biosphere. Death from inhaling the gas is very painful. It causes asphyxia and haemorrhaging. Like in On the Beach, the government has issued poisoned tablets to every citizen so that they have the option of a merciful suicide before the end. The Christmas party is therefore these people's last day on earth. They get drunk and dance and sing. They launch fireworks. Like the band playing on the Titanic, they are trying to maintain normality and enjoy what little time they have left. They speak frankly to each other, confessing things they would never say if they knew they had a future. They speculate about the afterlife. However, there is a strange twist in the final scene and the story is left very unresolved and open to interpretation. Art, the oldest boy, refuses to take the poisoned tablet and so collapses when he breathes the poisoned gas. His family all assume he is dead. They subsequently all take their tablets and die. During the night, the toxic cloud engulfs the house; yet in the morning everything looks normal. All that has happened is that snow has fallen and the sun rises on a white Boxing Day. In the very last shot, we see Art's eyes open. I'm not sure what this means. Was the cloud not really toxic and the government just said it was so that people would kill themselves, reducing the population? Is Art now a zombie, converted to the undead by the evil fumes? Are they all dead and we are seeing them arrive in Heaven or the Spiritworld? Who knows? The acting is very good, especially seeing as many of the central characters are young children. In the credit roll there is a "Covid safety expert"; never seen one of those before. I've noticed that dystopian fiction tends to emerge in times of hardship. The book and film The Road, which is referred to in the script, was published after the War on Terror and 2008 stock market crash. Silent Night is well worth seeing though, but don't watch if you want to inject a bit of Christmas goodwill into your family get together! Better to stick to The Muppets Christmas Carol. See here for the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ras0H9GEz5I.
See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/08/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-truth-seekers.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2019/12/its-wonderful-life-film-review.html.